Modifying Files In /etc

Posted May 9, 2012 8:36 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
In reply to: Modifying Files In /etc by ldo
Parent article: Control Centre: The systemd Linux init system (The H)

And if you used rcs you could keep an annotated history of your modifications. I use rcs because there's a port for absolutely all systems I use, even Windows, but git would do a better job.

And, btw, does anybody now why distributions are not doing this by default? I mean, having configuration files versioned. The rcs package is just a few KB, and would make things so much easier.

Modifying Files In /etc

Posted May 9, 2012 11:19 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (3 responses)

dpkg doesn't version them as such, but when a new version of a "conffile" is installed, dpkg will check to see if the original was modified by the user; if not, the new file replaces the old; if so, the user is asked whether they want to keep the new file, the old file, see a diff, etc. Then the old/new file (whichever the user didn't want to keep) is written out with the suffix .dpkg-{old,new} respectively for reference.

I have always been put off using tools like rcs or git to manage /etc because they don't preserve file metadata such as ownership, permissions, ACLs, xattrs, etc. Some day I'll check out etckeeper.